The field of photography has many participants. These range from professional photographers, to hobbyists, to family members taking pictures of their loved ones on special occasions. The photography industry is also a relatively mature one, photography having been developed about 150 years ago.
The quality of photography equipment has improved dramatically since the early years. There have been improvements in lens making and in camera mechanics, and there have been many technological improvements in film processing and printing, most notably the development of color photography. However, the technology of exposing film and paper to a light image and chemically developing the film and paper, used since the early days, has remained virtually unchanged over the years. Furthermore, the widespread proliferation of electronics have allowed photography novices to more easily take high quality pictures by reducing the occurrences of photographs out of focus and over or under exposed.
Film must still be developed by a chemical process in a darkroom and photographic paper must be exposed with an enlarger and then developed with another chemical process. These processes are relatively tedious and require relatively expensive equipment and meticulous skill to produce images of acceptable quality. Consequently, only the most advanced professionals posses the equipment and skills necessary to develop their own photographs. The vast majority of photographers must still take their exposed rolls of film to a commercial processor to be developed. Doing so is inconvenient and more than a week may elapse before the developed images are ready for pick up by the customer at the commercial processor's place of business.
As mentioned above, the insurgence of electronics into just about every aspect of life has improved the quality of photography for many people. A recent development that has had a profound impact on photography has been the digitizing of images. Digital images, along with the Internet, are revolutionizing the way media is delivered to people and the way people communicate, among other things. Digital images are created and obtained from a variety of sources. Some of the more common sources include digital cameras, the scanning of an image contained on paper and the capturing of images from a video signal. These images can be easily sent to a recipient far, far away from the sender via the internet.
A digital camera works like a traditional camera, in that it has a lens and a shutter. However, instead of film as in a traditional camera, it has a solid state image sensor, called a charge coupled device (“CCD”), that converts the light incident upon it into an electrical signal, which is then converted into a digital representation of the electrical signal. The digital representation can then be stored in various formats on various types of storage media. This allows the image to be easily transferred from the camera to a variety of other devices, such as a computer. When the image has been transferred to a computer, for example, it can be sent to another computer via the internet for viewing by someone else. This aspect provides many benefits. For instance, a parent can take a picture of a child, for instance, and then immediately store the image to a computer and send it, via the internet, to a grandparent living many miles away.
Another method of acquiring digital images is scanning an existing image contained on paper. This method uses a scanner, which also incorporates a light sensitive transducer for converting light into an electrical signal. Facsimile (“FAX”) machines, wherein the scanner technology has been employed for more than a decade, and the more recently derived flatbed scanners produce light that is reflected off the image to be scanned and onto the transducer. The resulting digital signal can then be transmitted over telephone lines from one fax machine to another, or from a flatbed scanner to a computer for transmitting over the internet as described above. Thus, there are multiple methods available for acquiring a digital image represented by an electronic signal.
Although multiple methods for acquiring a digital image exist, it is still often desirable to have an image on traditional media such a paper. This can be easily accomplished with computer printers commonly available, but the image quality from these printers is not as high as the quality of traditional developing on photographic paper. There are some printers that use thermal wax to render images on paper. These printers produce images of higher quality than the less expensive printers do, but the cost to the customer is high. Another problem with printing an image using a computer printer is due to the phenomenon that occurs when an image is displayed on a computer monitor. Tiny amounts of phosphor material are activated and add together to render the viewable image on the screen using a Red-Green-Blue color scheme (“RGB”). This generally results in a fairly accurate rendering of the image with respect to color, because many computer monitors are capable of rendering an image having a high gamma. However, when images are printed with a computer printer, the rendered image may not be accurate due to the generally low gamma capabilities of many computer printers. This creates a difference between how an image appears when viewing the image on a screen and how it appears when printed on paper. What one sees on the screen may not be actually what one gets on the paper. Furthermore, a computer printer only prints on one side of a medium, but a customer may want to annotate an image on the reverse with information such as the date the image was captured or a brief description of the image contents.
Devices exist that will project a digital image onto photographic paper and utilize the traditional method of treating the paper with chemicals in a dark environment to produce a viewable image paper. The result is a high quality image having a high gamma that differs in quality from a traditional photograph only to the extent of the limitations of the camera and CCD devices. Thus, an improvement over printing with a computer printer results. However, the image, whether digitized or on traditional film, must be delivered to a commercial establishment for printing on the photographic paper because the cost of the equipment and skill necessary to produce an image on photographic paper in the manner described above is beyond the means of the typical consumer.
Some systems that employ these devices use computer processors to manage the production of images on photographic paper and other media. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,436 relates to “[a]n image printing system for generating multiple printed image copies in response to an order. A processor can divide the order into multiple sub-orders for respective image printers, each sub-order having a sub-order header which includes a unique order identification and an indication of the number of copies of the image to be printed by the corresponding printer.”
However, the existing references in the area do not address the printing of information on the image reverse such that the printed matter is not affected by processing chemicals. Although it is common in the art to place a time and/or date stamp on an image reverse, this is typically done before an image is exposed on the photographic paper. Thus, the ink is affected by the processing chemicals such that the resulting printed information appears as a faint blue or pink color that may be hard to read. In addition, the printing machines currently used in the art do not associated specific information with a particular image.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a cost-effective method and system for printing a digital image on a high quality medium that overcomes the inconvenience of delivering and retrieving digitally encoded images between an establishment that specializes in printing such images and the customer who desires the images.
Furthermore, there is a need for the method and system to facilitate printing an annotation on the reverse of an image so that the printed annotation is not affected by the chemical developing process used with photographic paper media. Moreover, the annotation should be capable of containing information that is particular to the image to be printed, rather than merely containing the time at which the image was printed.
Finally, there is a need for the method and system to facilitate assembling an order of printed images.